Albena Yaneva is a sociologist and architectural theorist whose research crosses the boundaries of science studies, architectural theory, cognitive anthropology, and political philosophy. She is a Full Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Prior to that Yaneva worked at the University of Manchester, UK for 18 years where she led the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). She is the author of seven monographs: The Making of a Building (2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (2017), Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (2020), Latour for Architects (2022), Architecture After Covid (2023). She co-authored The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene (2020) with the Nobel Laureate in Physics Sir Kostya S. Novoselov.
Yaneva has held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden as well as Visiting Professorships at Columbia University, Princeton School of Architecture, and Parsons School of Design. She has delivered more than 200 invited lectures and keynote addresses at major conferences. She is the recipient of academic grants of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the British Academy, the EU, the Swedish Research Council, and the ESRC in the UK. She serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundations of USA, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Israel and the Netherlands.
Yaneva holds a diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA) from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Socialesand a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris where she worked alongside Bruno Latour. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai, Polish, Turkish, Bulgarian and Japanese. Yaneva is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-based research.